The Craft of Art

It's a traditional palette layout. All the colors grouped together, light to dark, whites in one corner, blacks cat-corner. I do blues and greens on the top, yellow to red down the side, violets and earths on the bottom, but this is more a function of the size and shape of your palette. The main thing is like next to like, color wheel order for colors adjacent to each other.

There's actually a good reason for this, it keeps the colors from affecting each other, red next to blue is different than red next to green, and neither is the actual color. red sandwiched between orange and violet is just red and is very close to the real color (which is something you may never see).

When painting flesh-tones each color has its own tint (mix w/ white) above (or below) it, and that's what the flesh tones are mixed from (Old school, anyway).

I've used this palette for 20 years. It's made from clear plexi, but although I scrape it down I haven't been able to see through for at least a decade.

And very heavy metal. I paint with real paints (and that means oils with real pigments), and although they make a big deal about lead white, the cadmium and cobalt, to name two heavy metal pigments, are both just as dangerous as is EVERY heavy metal, and should only be used while taking appropriate safety precautions.

Because your skin is oil based metals in the paint can pass right through into you, and once in they do not leave but settle in, poisoning your internal organs. The damage to your nervous system will drive you insane (and not the fun kind) This is the same disease as hatters used to get from the mercury in real felt, the disease characterized by Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter.

Latex gloves do NOT cut it, metals pass through these and most other gloves. What you want is a water based barrier cream. You can by this at art stores, but the kind made for make-up works just as well and is generally cheaper.

And that’s enough pedantic bullshit for know